The Urban Inn: Gathering Space, Hierarchy and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century British Town
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University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of Society and Culture The urban inn: gathering space, hierarchy and material culture in the eighteenth-century British town Maudlin, D http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/12917 10.1017/S0963926818000597 Urban History Cambridge University Press (CUP) All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. The Urban Inn: Gathering Space, Hierarchy and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century British Town Daniel Maudlin, Urban History, 2019 Inns were at the centre of everyday life in the eighteenth-century British town; if not the most important they were certainly the most useful – and used - institutions in town. Most urban institutions whether the courthouse, church, exchange, assembly room or market place, while central to civic life, had very specific functions and so were only used in specific ways on specific occasions. As buildings they spent much of their time empty. By contrast, inns were full of people most days because they provided a neutral, flexible gathering space that was available seven days a week. Inns provided warm, dry and welcoming communal rooms with no defined purpose (besides the sale and consumption alcohol) other than as spaces within which people could meet and spend time together for pleasure or business. The combination of availability and flexibility made them so useful day-to-day they were considered essential threads in the urban fabric. Adding to this essential everyday usefulness, the inn was also a meeting point for groups going on to somewhere else whether race meets, hunts or as military muster points (or for socialising after), while the flexibility of space inside also allowed landlords to host those temporary activities and events that enlivened the everyday from dances to sporting events, travelling shows and political hustings. Such is their historic significance as enablers of the everyday, this paper puts the case that life in the eighteenth- century British town cannot be fully understood without understanding inns. Looking closer, however, the dominant characteristic of the urban inn is that while neutral in terms of use they were not at all neutral in terms of user; a fact of eighteenth-century life forcibly maintained, reflected and reinforced by the physical fabric of the inns themselves. Seen collectively licensed premises - inns, taverns and alehouses - were not, as nineteenth- century romantic literature often suggests, democratic spaces where parson mixed with pedlar. Rather, each occupied a clearly delineated position within the social hierarchy; positions maintained through the strict spatial ordering of inns within a town. A typical pre- industrial British town would have had many inns in addition to taverns and alehouses. In 1620 the market town of Devizes, Wiltshire, issued licenses for 15 inns, 13 alehouses and one tavern, most of which were lined around the central market place, a total of almost thirty licensed premises that through strict regulation by the town corporation remained more or less constant through to the late nineteenth century.1 Peter Clark classified this mass of inns, taverns and alehouses according to a 'hierarchy of victualling'.2 That is, while inns are distinguished from taverns and alehouses by accommodating travellers as well as serving food and drink and providing sociable space, they were also distinguished by their position at the top of a social hierarchy of licensed premises (with taverns in the middle and the alehouse or common public house at the bottom).3 As noted by Clark, just as social distinctions between taverns and alehouses were not always clear, inns were themselves hierarchical.4 Some 'inns' were humble premises, little more than alehouses with rooms for poor, low-status travellers such as wagoners and drovers alongside sociable space for locals.5 Others were large, expensive, luxurious and architecturally ambitious serving only the upper ranks. Clark calls these 'county inns' and those that were 'marginally less exclusive', 'secondary inns'. 6 However, the term used in the long eighteenth-century was 'principal inn'.7 The principal inn was the best inn, or inns, in any given town: the largest, the grandest, most expensive and most exclusive. In Devizes the principal inns were The Bear and The Black Swan, facing each other across the Market Place (The Bear being the superior of the two). This paper is concerned with the principal inn as a lens through which to better understand polite society in the eighteenth-century British town. While the deeply hierarchical nature of Georgian Britain is well known, this paper seeks to demonstrate how hierarchy was encoded and enforced through the manipulation of urban space and the materiality of constantly occupied built spaces. As with taverns and alehouses lower down the social scale, a principal inn was the gathering space for any of the sociable activities performed by the elite group it served: from dining, drinking and conversing with friends to commercial activities (from hosting public auctions to private rooms for making business deals) meetings of club and societies, legal proceedings, military musters, political meetings - hustings and campaign headquarters - civic and religious proceedings as well as leisure activities such as dancing and a fashion for billiards.8 Bundling together any and all activities involving communal gathering and social exchange - from the exercise of law and government to leisure pursuits - principal inns located polite sociability within a form of built space specifically constructed to enforce social hierarchies, to exclude from the outside while offering an inclusive warm welcome inside.9 Whether in the context of travel, commerce, sociability, drinking, law and order or any of the many other daily operations of urban life, most monographs and edited collections on early modern British towns mention inns.10 However, despite the plethora of inn-related references, few identify the inn itself as a subject of significance. Here, A. M. Everitt's Perspective's in English Urban History (1972), Peter Borsay's The English Urban Renaissance (1989) and Rosemary Sweet's The English Town (1999) stand out as major studies that recognise the importance of the inn as 'the focal point of the community'.11 Outside of urban history, Peter Clark's The English Alehouse (1983), while more concerned with the history from below of the common alehouse, also recognised the wider social and economic significance of urban inns.12 There is also an inn-shaped gap in British architectural history, only partially filled by a handful of regional studies.13 This gap can be perhaps attributed to the awkward nature of inns as a building type. Since the 1940s the study of building form and design has been divided between Architectural History, rooted in Art History as the study of buildings as authored works of art, and Vernacular Architecture Studies, which focusses on anonymous small-scale regional, often rural, buildings rooted in Archaeology and Folklore Studies.14 Inns, however, fall between these two disciplines as they are neither major works attributed to significant architects - though they may often be classified as 'minor works', such as The Crown in Stony Stratford, Staffordshire, by the society architect Henry Holland - nor are they small rural dwellings but large urban buildings that are at once anonymous, ordinary, everyday and fashionable, accomplished works of architecture.15 However, if we look at the production and consumption of built space in terms of its users the inn moves to centre stage. The Principal Inn as Polite Gathering Space The principal inn existed to serve polite society or 'the better sort': a broad subcultural group which on any given evening in the same inn could extend from the parson to merchants, urban professionals and town aldermen upwards through the local gentry, government officials and military officers to elite 'persons of consequence', such as county court judges and the aristocracy.16 Across relatively substantial gulfs in wealth and status between a parson, a lawyer and a Duke, polite society gathered and mixed as a single, self-affirming group within the semi-public space of the principal inn. Drinking venues - inns, taverns and alehouses - have been presented as destabilising, subversive elements in the early modern town but principal inns were not: they served to support and enforce the social order.17 Besides providing sociable spaces to sit, eat and drink, principal inns supplemented or stood- in for more functionally-specific associated with the social group it served; that is, Anglican churches, courtrooms, town halls, guildhalls, exchanges, assembly rooms, coffee houses, theatres, members’ clubs and subscription libraries.18 The George in Stamford, Lincolnshire, for example, hosted cotillions (dances) in its assembly room, served as a bankruptcy court, an auction room, a meeting point for the local hunt and the Stamford races, a barber's shop and, in 1804, a chapel of rest for the body of the Duchess of Ancaster.19 A small town, such as Topsham, Devon, or Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, may not have had a courthouse or